How, how did that come to be?

Oh.

Okay.

So, um, yeah.

[laughs] I was in Hobart.

So I did eight cities in eight years, and I was kinda trying to get to a bigger market each time.

I'd got out of radio news.

How did you approach telling them?

Yeah.

And one chose to leave them, abandon them, if you want to be really harsh.

And in my angrier moments, I do feel that.

And let me be very clear, I've never had mental health issues, so I don't ever want to undermine the implications of that.

Mm-hmm.

But the choice is he left permanently.

And so then I'm going, here's all the reasons why.

Very

How hard was it?

In the first telling of my story, and let me be clear, I wrote it not necessarily thinking I was going to publish it.

I wrote it sort of, I started writing it about a year after Sean died and I just needed to make sense of it.

There was something about what had happened to our family that I needed to be able to put into some sort of order.

So, and I spewed forth like so many words.

Oh, like 150,000, I think.

And what a normal book's 80,000.

Tell me about when you did meet again.

Yeah.

And he gave me the best piece of parenting advice ever, which is be age appropriate, but be honest.

So I think from that moment on, every single parenting move that I made, and there's a lot of them in the book because, you know, my kids had very different experiences through their adolescence because of what had happened.

It just became the mantra of getting out there and being honest.

So then when five weeks after Tony had died, I was still at home and Lou and my middle son, who was the 12-year-old, came to me and said, you've got to go back to work.

And I said, why? And he said, because you're using too many words on me.

But he was serious.

working full-time for those mums out there and we have talked about this sort of thing before on the podcast it's bloody hard like to do that it really it's such a juggle and you've got three kids right so they're you're talking about sport they're wanting to go here there and everywhere you're on radio high pressure job it's live right you have to be there in a certain time you don't have flexibility in your working hours how hard was that part of your how did

I'd love to hear more.

Yeah, Laurie, before we hit record, we were talking about our last podcast awards.

And for the second year in a row, I was sitting there just thinking, this is such a surreal.

I was looking at the people in the room.

I was looking how they were connecting.

And we've had stories of two Karises, spelled C-E-R-Y-S, who had never met each other, never met another Karis, met at our event.

And now they're very tight.

Because I know you do care deeply about the services you're providing and the employees you're reaching.

Can you talk a bit about that time and losing Tony? And also, can you talk about how you tell your three young sons that their dad has died?

Around that time, we were separated under the same roof.

Things had not been going well for a really long time.

His business was... a major contributor to the pressure.

He had attempted twice before, but they were never going to kill him.

And we had three kids and they were nine, 12 and 14.

And they were aware of stuff going on.

story.